"Sorcerer's Son" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phyllis Eisenstein)

“You look well,” she said. “You heal quickly. Youth always heals quickly.” She smiled.

“Come, sit down with me. Don’t push yourself too far; a wound like that needs gentle care.”

“I can never thank you enough for your gentle care, Delivev.” Stiffly, he eased himself to the sun-warmed stone bench. “I would have died that night if not for you.”

“It was a foul night for swordplay.”

“The swordplay was in the daytime, under a clear sky. It was quite finished when the storm began.”

From the lush growth at her feet, she plucked a handful of varicolored flowers and began to twine their stems together in a wreath. “You have not told me your tale yet—where you come from, how you received that wound, what happened to your adversary. I have waited patiently while you slept the days away and drank my soup. I hope I won’t have to wait any longer.”

“I don’t consider it a very interesting tale.”

“Let me judge it.”

“Very well. I am the younger son of a younger son, so far removed from nobility that I inherited nothing but the right to become a knight. When I gained my arms, I left home to travel the wide world. Since then, I have roamed far, serving petty men in their personal wars, surviving partly through skill and partly through luck. Most recently, I swore two years’ allegiance to the Lord of the East March, a better man than some. I had been with him almost a year when he entrusted me with a message to his cousin at Falconhill—I was on my way there when I was stopped on the road and challenged by a rather large and angry-looking knight. I don’t know what I did to provoke him; perhaps his teeth hurt and he was trying to find something to take his mind off the pain. We fought on foot, sword to sword, and he was a good fighter, but I was better. He did catch me in the side, but it was too late for him: at almost the same instant I struck him a mortal blow. At first, I hardly noticed that I had been touched, but when I tried to dig a grave for him, I almost fainted. I knew then that he would have to remain unburied, and I climbed on my horse and started out to look for help. I remember the sky darkening and the rain wetting me, but no more until I woke in your castle.”

Delivev settled the wreath on her hair. “Knighthood,” she said. “You like it?”

“I know nothing else.”

“There are other trades. Safer trades.”

“My father was a knight; I have no entry to another trade. Nor do I know of one that pleases me as well. Would I wish to be a tinker or a smith? I think not.”

“You enjoy risking your life for petty men? You yourself called them petty.”

He plucked a single blossom and held it cupped in his hand, looking down at its pale yellow against his ruddy flesh. “Someday I will find a lord I can love, and him I will serve without complaint.” He glanced up at Delivev. “Shall I hear your tale now, my lady?”

“Mine?” She shook her head. “I have none to tell.”

“What, a sorceress all alone in this,” he waved an arm to include the whole of Castle Spinweb, “and no tale at all? Do you expect me to believe that?”

“I am a sorceress. They call me the Weaver sometimes. The castle was my mother’s, and her mother’s before her. None but my family have ever lived here, and I seldom leave. I lead a quiet life—you see all my world around you.”

“The Weaver. What does that name mean?”

She pointed to a nearby trellis, cloaked with climbing roses. “You see the pattern there, the interlacing tendrils, the stems weaving in and out of the wooden support? Those roses are mine because of the way they grow. I could make them climb to my topmost tower in a few moments, or I could make them reach out to you, envelop you in their thorns, scratch your life away. Birds are mine, too, if they weave their nests, and snakes because they twine like living threads, and spiders that make webs—you’ll find them in every room of Castle Spinweb.”

“And cloth?” asked Gildrum.

“Cloth of course,” and she nodded toward him, causing his silken robe to tighten in a brief embrace.

He laughed. “Do your guests ever worry that the blankets on their beds might turn against them?”

“If my guests meant me harm, they would do well to worry so. But I rarely have guests.

You are the first… in a long time.”